God Hates Us

Friday, March 27, 2009

It's no secret to anyone who's known me long enough that I spent the '90s without any discernable taste in music. I've accumulated a lot of shitty albums that generally gather dust in my box of shame. But since we've revived this blog, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of "music Schmusic" posts reexamining those terrible albums in a humorous and snarky fashion: you know, what the internet was made for. To start, I picked a nice low-hanging fruit, the debut album of the Spice Girls, "Spice."

Imagine my shock at discovering that, comparatively, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong; it's not good, but after years of Britney Spears and Fergie and The Pussycat Dolls, this sounds like fucking Beethoven. There's harmonizing, and singing without pitch modulation and lyrics with subtext--anymore I feel lucky when I hear lyrics with text on Top 40 radio. By any sane metric, it's vapid pop trash to be sure, but it shows some measure of craftsmanship that's greater than what you'd hear on the pop station today. What does it say about our society that even the standards of prepackaged, manufactured soulless pop music have fallen?

Monday, March 16, 2009

Rob Zombie's "Halloween" was fucking lousy. Not really awful, just lousy; It was kind of like getting a C+ in your favorite subject. You certainly could have done a lot worse, but you know you wasted an opportunity. Add into the equation the fact that you didn't need to take the class at all -- you elected to -- and there you are. Rob Zombie took a true horror classic -- one that in no way needed to be remade -- and turned it into something resoundingly mediocre.

"But wait," one might say. "Rob Zombie's fucking edgy; horror movies today are made for fucking pussies, so he needed to take you candy asses to school. He made 'Halloween' EXTREME."

Here's the problem with that: A pseudo-Freudian analysis of young Michael Myers is not fucking edgy. Spending 40 goddamn minutes exploring li'l Mike's mommy issues is not scary, it's not extreme, it's fucking stupid. The reason why is quite simple: If you're pure evil, you don't need a fucking reason.

Compare the backstories of the two Michaels: What little we know of the 1977 Michael is shown in the film's first five minutes. He is raised in a well-kept, subruban home, has two normal parents and then one night he slices up his sister just 'cause. 2007's Michael, on the other hand, grows up in Boo fucking Radley's hovel, is neglected by his stripper mother and abused by his alcholic stepfather and starts killing people because ... they're mean to him. You tell me which is more extreme.

But none of my complaints about the remake (and there are many more) were large enough to write them up. This was: Rob Zombie is making a sequel, and he's cast a new actor to play young Michael Myers.

The sequel was obvious. It's a horror movie and it didn't lose money, so it was bound to happen. But another actor playing young Michael Myers? Don't get me wrong, I had no love for that pudgy little chode you case to play him in the last movie, it's just that a new young Michael Myers suggests another flashback-laden examination of Michael's "disturbed" childhood. The announcement that Zombie's wife Sherri Moon Zombie will return as Michael's mother confirms this. EXTREME!

Honest to fucking Christ, Rob, what more is there to tell? Are we going to see the chilling story of how 5-year-old Michael pulled the wings off a fly because he lost at dodgeball? Seriously, continually tinkering with the backstory of an estabalished backstory of a character is not some great, cerebrial storytelling; it's fanfic.

But the best part is the new title: Halloween: The Devil Walks Among Us.

Ho. Lee. Shit.

Just further reminder of what I've always thought: if Milton had put a fifteen chapters at the beginning of Paradise Lost where he delved into Lucifer's bed wetting problems, it would have been way scarrier.